The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A control system is a device, or set of devices, that manages or regulates the behavior of other devices or systems. The devices and systems may be computers or networks. Control of the system may involve processing data and executing actions within a centralized control manager.
While this centralized model may work well with a local sensor network located within a data center, the model has serious flaws when placed in a poorly connected wide area network. In a wide area network, any computer may be defined as a control manager, but programming the connected devices to perform as agents may be difficult because of poor accessibility and scalability.
In addition, unreliable network connectivity, variable latency across the network, dynamic changes to the number of sensors, geographic distribution of sensors, changes to rule sets, and availability of nodes on the network also may cause problems.
Using rule based multi-agent systems, a set of preconfigured agents to execute hard coded rules and algorithms may be required but pre-configured policies for each node before a system can function would cause the system to fail because of the unreliable network connectivity of the wide area networks.